Information & Computational Sciences

Paul Shaw

Paul Shaw is an informatician within the Information and Computational Sciences Group at The James Hutton Institute and has worked with us since 2002.

His primary interests are in the development of biological databases mainly in the genetic resources community and in the development of visualization tools to aid in the understanding of complex biological data.

We are pleased to announce that Paul Shaw has won best paper at BioVis 2014 in Boston USA this year with his paper titled “Helium: Visualizing Large Scale Plant Pedigrees”. BioVis was part of ISMB. The paper looked at the problems associated with visualizing plant pedigrees and the development and evaluation of the Helium pedigree […]

Word clouds sometimes get a hard time (and sometimes justifiably so) but they have functionality that makes them an effective way to look for errors in large textual-based datasets. In this example we used the online word cloud based service Wordle http://www.wordle.net/ after running a Perl program over as much pedigree data as we could gather on […]

As part of my personal development (and love of audio), I started listening to a lot of tech podcasts this year. Over the years I have occasionally listened to Michael Kennedy’s ‘Talk Python to me’, it is only more recently I have really started to explore this form of learning. The purpose of this blog […]